Read Online A Man to Die for by Eileen Dreyer - Free Book Online Page A

toward his surprised mother when he looked as if he was going to follow her back out. “You don’t want him out in the work lane about now.”
    “He’s bored,” she protested flatly.
    “Better bored than trampled,” Casey retorted much more lightly than she would have liked and pulled the door shut after her.
    “I can’t get a line in!” Marva was protesting from across the hall.
    Casey trotted on into the room and accepted goggles and gloves from Michael where he was stationed at the big cart. “What about a gown?” she asked. “I don’t even have scrubs.”
    He shrugged. “Central supply’s out.”
    Casey took a look at what was left of the victim to calculate potential danger and caught sight of the long-abused veins. “And I don’t want AIDS,” she decided. “Call surgery or isolation and get some up here.”
    Snapping the gloves in place, she grabbed a tourniquet and Cathlon catheter and went after a vein. It was her gift, her specialty. Marva called her a diviner. No matter what kind of condition the patient was in, Casey could usually get a peripheral vein to start IVs, especially in critical situations. Somehow the adrenaline rush improved her aim.
    “I’ll do drugs,” she offered, noting that one of the paramedics was on top doing CPR and Janice was assessing as she cut off clothes. Marva was still trying for a line on the other side, and Steve was relegated to keeping track of everything that went on via flow chart.
    “I heard that about you.” Marva grinned.
    “Everybody has to be good at something,” Casey retorted, fingers probing the flaccid arm.
    “Please, Jesus,” Marva crooned as she slid her needle into the patient’s other arm, “let me get this one. Please, sweet Jesus, help us out here, give your Marva the touch…Goddamn it, you son of a bitch, don’t roll on me!”
    Casey considered Marva the perfect Baptist trauma nurse. Casey, on the other hand, was a hummer. She was no more than eight bars into “Stairway to Heaven,” when she felt a telltale pop at the end of the Cathlon.
    “Damn, am I good!” she crowed, whipping her hand into the air like a successful calf roper. From just behind her, Michael handed her the end of the IV line. Slipping out the needle, she hooked the line up to the catheter and reached for her tape.
    “Well, shit,” Marva whined. “Why do. I waste my time? All that heartfelt prayin’ and you still beat; me.”
    “Clean livin’, girl.” She wasn’t going to have any teeth left in another five years between gnawing on needle caps and tearing tape. She was doing it again, ruining her incisors in her haste to secure the line.
    “All right, all right, all right,” a voice behind her announced in stentorian tones with more than a touch of the Middle East in it. “What do we have here?”
    Casey gave way to a silent groan. Damn. “Never Say Die” Ahmed, the surgical resident with the record for the longest unsuccessful code in Mother Mary history. Portly, swarthy, and usually ill-mannered, he was not a favorite in codes. The units had long since dubbed him Rip Van Trachea for his unique intubation technique. Luckily, the patient already had the endotracheal tube in place, and the respiratory tech was bagging him.
    “Looks to me like we’ve got a man without half a face,” Casey answered without looking up from her work. Michael handed her a bristoject of epinephrine and she began to inject it into her line.
    “Or you could say he’s a man with half a face still left,” Marva offered from where she’d just found similar success with her IV line and was hooking up the blood tubing.
    Casey snorted in derision. “Optimist.”
    “Who shot him?” Ahmed asked.
    “From the powder burns on his right temple,” the paramedic answered. “I’d say he did.”
    “Would you like to follow ACLS protocol?” Casey asked, passing the spent plastic prepackaged syringe back to Michael.
    “Oh.” Ahmed stood like an island of silence in the midst